Bob Braun worked for the Star-Ledger for 49 years as education editor and senior columnist. He publishes the blog Bob Braun’s Ledger.
school

Let’s get this straight. Those of us opposed to the structural changes to public education em-braced by crusaders ranging from the billionaire Koch brothers and the Walton Family Founda-tion to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—along with Governor Chris Christie and Microsoft found-er Bill Gates—are not opposed to the reform of public schools. We oppose their destruction.We do not oppose making schools more accountable, equitable and effective—but we do opposewrecking a 200-year-old institution—public education—that is still successful in New Jersey.

Public schools give students from all
backgrounds a common heritage and a
chance to compete against privileged
kids from private schools. We don’t want
schools replaced by the elitists’ dream of
privately managed, publicly funded charter schools, which can be money makers
for closely aligned for-profit entities.

We oppose eliminating tenure and find
laughable the idea embodied in Teach for
America (TFA), an organization that recruits new college graduates for short
stays in urban schools, that effective
classroom instructors can be trained in
weeks if they’re eager and want breaks
on student loans—breaks that come with
TFA participation. We oppose breaking
teacher unions, reducing education to
the pursuit of better test scores and using
test results to fire teachers. We want our
teachers to be well trained, experienced,
secure, supervised, supported and well
paid. We want our kids to graduate from
high school more than “college and career
ready”—a favorite slogan of the reformers. We want them to graduate knowing
garbage when they see it—to understand
mortgages, for example, rather than just
solving trigonometry problems.

Don’t call it reform, call it hijacking. Aradical, top-down change in governancebased on a business model championed bybillionaires like Eli Broad, the entrepreneurwhose foundation underwrites trainingprograms for school leaders, including su-perintendents—among them, ChristopherCerf, New Jersey’s education commission-er from late 2010 until this past February.The Broad Foundation seeks to apply topublic institutions, like schools, the notionof “creative destruction” popularized forbusinesses by economists Joseph Schum-peter and Clayton Christensen. In a memoforced into public view by New Jersey’sEducation Law Center, leaders of the BroadSuperintendents Academy wrote that theyseek to train leaders willing to “challengeand disrupt the status quo.”Sorry, but it’s neither clever nor wiseto disrupt schools, especiallyurban schools. Irrespon-sible, distant billionairescause unrest in com-munities like Newark,a place they’ll likely never get closerto than making a plane connectionat its airport. These tycoons say theywant to improve learning—to narrow